Companies may demand more post-consumer material, but the supply still relies on the whims of municipalities and consumers, and "there's no real incentive built in to maximise recovery or material value," says Kate Eagles of NAPCOR, a trade association for the plastic packaging industry in North America.
Witness the burst of innovation as companies scramble to help farmers, municipalities and consumers save precious water.
If the markets get spooked, U.S. treasury bond yields will spike, driving up interest rates and increasing the price of borrowing money for everyone from the federal government to municipalities to consumers, Fratto warned.
State law requires every county to have a weights and measures official, but municipalities that had consumer affairs department before 1976 were allowed to continue those operations.
It supports planning, communication, and capital-intensive measures in four sectors: municipalities, the economy, consumers, and education [39].
"It's the pressure of debt on consumers, corporates, municipalities," Pettifor says, raising the spectre of the kind of debt trap identified by the US economist Irving Fisher in the wake of the Great Depression.
Back in the 80s and 90s, when cable markets were being established, they competed for municipalities, rather than individual consumers.
The proposal is likely to be debated and draw scrutiny from consumer groups, local municipalities and state regulators in a review process that could last close to a year.
Thousands of municipalities across the globe require consumers to pay for each bag of waste contributed to collection agencies or subsidize consumer recycling efforts – both examples of environmental taxes.
It also includes financial incentives for consumers of water — municipalities and farming interests — to use less.
